Midday Roundup: Congress effuses Christmas spirit in bipartisan spending bill

Let’s make a deal. Leaders in the House and Senate reached a deal yesterday to keep the government funded with a $1 trillion spending package. Congress has until tomorrow to vote on the deal to prevent another government shutdown. Although some conservatives wanted to use the threat of a shutdown to force President Barack Obama to drop his executive order on immigration, most Republicans said such a hardline approach would ultimately hurt the party at a time when it’s enjoying widespread support from the American people. Yesterday’s bipartisan agreement also sidelines a marijuana legalization measure approved by Washington, D.C., voters earlier this year and significantly raises the limit on individual donations to political parties—from $32,400 annually to $324,000.

Torture report fallout. Reaction overseas to yesterday’s Senate report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture tactics has been muted, although U.S. embassies and other facilities remain on alert for retaliatory violence. But a special investigator with the United Nations wants senior Bush administration officials who knew about the agency’s interrogation methods prosecuted. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy … must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” said Ben Emmerson, the UN’s special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. “The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”

Alive and well? North Korean state television claims nine children who defected through China to Laos but were sent back to the country are alive and well. The official broadcast showed a video of four of the children as proof that they are not suffering persecution for trying to escape the country’s brutal dictatorship. But reporters, activists, and the man who sheltered them after their initial escape from North Korea doubt the video is recent. A woman who defected from the town where the nine orphans were returned said two of the children had been executed and the others were taken to a prison camp. Although the report is difficult to verify, the South Korean missionaries who helped the children believe it’s true. South Korean news outlets have picked up the story, putting pressure on the North Korean government to refute the claims.

Safety first. Efforts by members of the LGBT community to convince the Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on blood donations from homosexual men aren’t working. An FDA panel tasked with considering the ban declined to take up the issue this year. The panel last voted to uphold the ban in 2010. Although methods to detect HIV in donated blood have come a long way since the ban was enacted in the 1980s, tests still can’t identify very early HIV infections. Homosexual men have the highest rates of new HIV infections in the United States. Even some gay activists oppose lifting the ban, saying it isn’t safe until testing methods can be 100 percent accurate.

Unimportant? The U.S. Census Bureau may drop questions about marriage from its annual American Community Survey (ACS), leaving valuable data on families uncollected. Under the proposal, the ACS would no longer ask respondents about whether they got married, divorced, or were widowed. It also would drop questions about how many times respondents had been married and the year of their marriages. The proposal is a bid to make the survey shorter, officials with the Census Bureau said. They put the marriage questions on the chopping block because the federal agencies that use the data collected in the survey said information about marriage was the least useful. Pro-family groups say collecting the information is vital to spotting and analyzing important trends affecting the American family.